“Oh my god, I can’t find it! My mom is going to kill me! It’s literally all I get this week for my allowance which means if I can’t find it I can’t go out, like, at all this weekend!”

The girl with the high ponytail and blue shirt was wildly digging through her gym bag shreeching in a shrill voice to the three girls lazily standing near her.

“Well, maybe you left it at home by accident?”
“Maybe it dropped out of your bag!”
“We could always just hang out at my house on Friday instead of going out?”

The girls around her squeaked but ponytail girl just brushed them off.

“Now, I swear to god I left if in my bag! And it couldn’t have dropped out, I haven’t opened my gym bag all day until now, and seriously? I’ve been looking forward to going out since last week. God, this is so unfair!”

I couldn’t help but feel the impossible weight of the two thick twenty dollar bills in my hand. But kept my lips sealed as I sat, hushed in the girl’s gym locker room bathroom.

“Damn. It’s time to go.”

The ponytail girl huffed out a long irritated breath of anger as she stormed out of the locker room, the three girls scurried out after her just as the end of the day bell rang.

A breathed out a sigh of anxious relief.

If she had found me I don’t know what I would have done.

Unfolding my hand I stared guiltily into the face of Andrew Jackson, his scholarly glare piercing into my heated face.

“It’s not like I wanted to steal her money…”

I whispered into his papery ears. I rolled my eyes thinking about ponytail girl wasting her money on a “night out”. She probably wanted to go to a movie with her friends or maybe a nice dinner or maybe shopping for new clothes. I couldn’t help but feel little beads of sweat congregate on the hairline of my forehead, how could I not feel guilty? All she wanted was to go out with her friends and do normal teen things. My hand balled up in a fist of jealousy, it’s all I wanted too. Besides, she gets forty dollars from her parents on a weekly basis for an allowance, she doesn’t even work for the money she gets! I don’t even make that much in a week working at the retail store downtown. She thought things were unfair for her? They’re even worse for me. My parents don’t just give me forty dollars, they barely made enough for the gym clothes I’m wearing right now!

My eyes stared down into the crumpled forty dollars, to think there was so much possibility in just two thin papery bills. I could buy new gym shoes or buy groceries or even buy my little sister that toy she wanted last week. I smiled, thinking of what I could do with the money. Yes, ponytail girl with have to miss her movie this friday but she can go see one next week. This week, this money is going to help pay for my family’s dinner.